On one side is Fulton County, which missed a chance early last year to relieve chronic overcrowding at its jail by buying Atlanta’s jail at a steep discount.
On the other is the city, which now says it no longer wants to sell its jail — and certainly not at any fire-sale price.
Overseeing it all is a highly frustrated Marvin Shoob, the 88-year-old liberal lion of Georgia’s federal judiciary who’s been watching over Fulton’s jail for more than a decade. The senior U.S. district judge is at his wits’ end over the county’s inability to solve its jail problems, so much so he has threatened to jail the entire County Commission for contempt.
“I’ve talked to the warden at the Atlanta Penitentiary, and he’s got room for everybody,” Shoob said during a recent meeting with county officials.
Shoob said Fulton is violating a 5-year-old consent order that declared inmates at the jail cannot be forced to sleep on the floor. This spring, more than 3,400 inmates did, Shoob’s jail monitor found. In August, almost 1,400 had to do so.
“We’re running a jail like a Third World country,” an exasperated Shoob, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, said during the meeting. As for fixing the problem, “I don’t care where they get the money.”
Last week, the County Commission voted unanimously against two recent proposals by Atlanta to help relieve Fulton’s jail problem. The commission declined to buy the city jail for $85 million — noting the city asked for $40 million last year. It also rejected the city’s offer to reserve 400 to 750 beds at its jail for county inmates, at a cost of up to $103 per inmate per night.
“I don’t know what the answer is,” Commissioner Tom Lowe said last week. “It’s terribly frustrating. But the answer might be that we need to build a new jail, something with a couple thousand beds.”
Depending on its design, a new jail with ample bed space could cost more than $150 million.
Shoob has determined the best short-term solution for the county is to buy the city jail, and he’s given the commission until Nov. 1 to do it. If that does not happen, he has ordered county commissioners to appear before him Nov. 8 and show cause why they should not be held in contempt.
The judge arranged for a meeting Thursday to facilitate negotiations between the county and the city. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Chief Operating Officer Peter Aman, Fulton Commission Chairman John Eaves and County Manager Zachary Williams are to attend.
“We want to see if an arrangement that is fair to all parties can be reached,” Shoob said.
Reed said the city’s position with regard to its 1,314-bed jail — which houses about 350 city detainees a day — has changed. “We don’t want to sell the jail anymore,” he said. “We don’t even want to have this conversation, but we’re going to do it for Judge Shoob, whom I respect.”
Ever since Fulton opened its jail in 1989, the facility has encountered problems. Its 2,500-bed capacity is the smallest of any jail in the five-county metro region, and Fulton has failed to add more beds in the face of repeated calls for expansion.
Two studies conducted for the county in recent years recommended an expansion of the county jail through phased construction programs.
“By all appearances,” Shoob wrote in a recent order, “both of those studies, for which the county paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, are now sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering dust.”
Two blue-ribbon commissions have suggested the county lease or buy the city jail. “The county ignored both recommendations,” Shoob noted.
Shoob first began delving into conditions at the Fulton jail in 1999, presiding over a lawsuit filed by eight HIV-positive inmates who said medical care was so deplorable it threatened their lives. Shoob later expanded his jurisdiction to the jail’s general conditions, saying they hindered the jail’s ability to provide adequate care.
The jail’s population swelled to 3,500. There were electrical outages, broken air-conditioning systems, ruptured pipes, sewage overflows, and washers and dryers in disrepair. The conditions produced a cauldron of agitation throughout the overcrowded facility; attacks became commonplace and a monitor appointed by Shoob described the jail as “scary” after one visit.
The suit filed by HIV-positive inmates eventually settled after the county upgraded medical care. But in 2004, Shoob began overseeing another case — a handwritten complaint filed by inmate Frederick Harper. His case was taken up by the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, which amended the lawsuit to represent all inmates at the jail.
Harper’s suit is the one Shoob still presides over today. After the suit was filed, Shoob initially required Fulton to keep its jail population at no more than 2,250 inmates and increased the cap in April 2010 to 2,500 inmates.
Mary Sidney Kelly, an investigator for the Southern Center, said the 2,500-inmate cap and county-financed renovations have helped. “The conditions are improved, but there are still people on the floor and they’re still understaffed,” she said.
Kelly also said jail staff must now deal with a more challenging population — younger inmates facing more violent gang-related offenses.
Melanie Velez, a lawyer for the center, said Shoob had been extremely patient until recent disclosures that hundreds of inmates are sleeping on floors.
“It’s reached a crisis point,” she said. “It’s unfortunate it’s come to this, because I think they missed an opportunity last year.”
That opportunity was the city’s offer to sell its jail to the county for about $40 million, allowing Fulton to make 13 lease payments of $3.2 million a year to gain control of the jail in 2024.
This month, however, Fulton commissioners bristled at the city’s decision to hike its price tag to $85 million, even though a company hired by the county had appraised the value of the jail at $89 million almost six years ago.
Georgia State University real estate professor Alan Ziobrowski said that while real estate has plummeted in value since 2005, the $89 million value of the city jail likely still holds. For that type of specialized property, he said, the only way to find a comparable property to estimate value is to look at the cost of building a new facility.
Reed, in a telephone interview last week, said when the city made its initial offer early last year, Atlanta was facing a $48 million budget shortfall, was desperate for revenue and willing to get out of the jail business.
Atlanta now has excess revenue, has decreased by $4 million the annual cost of running the jail and has its largest police force in history — meaning more arrests and more need for jail beds, Reed said.
“I have to have the jail space to accommodate the people we are arresting,” he said. “Our position has changed. I am reluctant to enter into a transaction where we’re not assured of jail space.”
About two years ago, Reed said, the city assigned a team to begin negotiations with the county, but the county did not reciprocate. “I’m a bit stunned to be where we are now,” he said. “I never had a dance partner for two years. I’ve been dancing alone.”
Fulton Commissioner Bill Edwards said the county did not outright refuse the initial $40 million offer from the city. There were conditions in the offer the county found unacceptable, he said.
This included a provision that called on the county to provide current city employees the first opportunity to apply for staffing positions. Also, county inspectors found the city jail needs about $50 million in renovations and repairs, he said.
“We didn’t just turn it down,” Edwards said. “There were conditions in there that we couldn’t deal with. Let’s be fair about the whole thing.”
State Rep. Lynne Riley, R-Johns Creek, who served on the County Commission last year, said she believes the “outsourcing” of inmates to other counties seemed to be a better fiscal option than buying the city jail and spending more on renovations.
The county has sought to relieve overcrowding by sending inmates to jails in other counties. At one point, Fulton was shipping some pretrial detainees to South Georgia, but Shoob put a halt to that after public defenders complained they couldn’t talk to their clients.
According to county documents, Fulton has agreements to house spillover inmates in eight other jails. For example, Morgan County, about 60 miles to the east, and Gilmer County, almost 80 miles north, have each agreed to take up to 20 inmates for $35 per inmate per day.
An agreement with Union City would allow the county to house up to 200 inmates in that city’s jail that could, by the end of the month, eliminate the instances of inmates sleeping on floors, a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.
Fulton taxpayers spent more than $42 million to outsource inmates from 2006 through 2010. This year, the county spent more than $3.4 million.
Calvin Lightfoot, appointed by Shoob to monitor jail conditions, said the time has come for the county to finally address overcrowding. “The bottom line now is they have to bring in more beds,” he said. “The immediate concern is to get these inmates off the floor.”
Staff writer Rhonda Cook contributed to this article.
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